I was really worried I’d dredge up another Christina Aguilera track from Bionic today, so this is an even more welcome treat.
‘Rose Parade’ is one of the standout tracks from Elliott Smith’s wonderful album Either/Or. It details, in a more straightforward way than he normally used, his participation in a street parade.
A couple of weeks ago, I singled Aimee Mann out as the poster child for melancholy music. Well, she ain’t got nothing on Elliott Smith.
At least Mann has a dry sense of humor (hell, she even had a cameo in The Big Lebowski). Smith, on the other hand, writes music just perfect for wrist-slitting.
I mean that quite literally — Wes Anderson chose the Elliott Smith song ‘Needle in the Hay’ for a scene depicting an attempted suicide in The Royal Tenenbaums. Top that, poseurs!
Either/Or was not my first exposure to Elliott Smith and challenges my “first love” theory by being my favorite by far.
I discovered Smith through his follow-up record, 1998’s XO, then sought out his back catalog. All of his albums have a similar mood and sound, with varying levels of production values, but Either/Or hits the sweet spot.
Elliott Smith’s sixth album was released a year after his death, cobbled together by his former producer and his former girlfriend from a batch of recordings he’d completed before committing suicide.
It’s difficult to call From a Basement On a Hill a proper Elliott Smith album because there’s no way of knowing which of these songs, if any, he would have chosen to include, and which other tracks he might have never gotten around to recording (let alone what sequence he would have chosen, what artwork, and all the rest).
Elliott Smith followed up XO two years later with 2000’s Figure 8, which would end up as his final release before his suicide.
Figure 8 was his most baroque and expansive album yet, and perhaps his most critically-acclaimed. Smith had a larger profile now, at least by the standards of an indie singer-songwriter, and he reacted to the expanding spotlight by going to wonderful new places musically.
Personally, it was quite a different story, but with Smith, who from the start projected a tortured persona, it was never clear how truly tortured he was.
Meet Me In Montauk 